Galaxy Namespace Request

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Hey All,

I wanted to create a post to start a discussion around how folks request namespaces going forward on galaxy and the possibility of a self service kind of deal.

Currently, the namespace requests process is done through the old codebase’s github repository. You open an issue with the namespace template, provide some details and an engineer/admin will review it and create it accordingly.

Moving forward, we (Ansible Engineering/Galaxy engineering/Ansible Community Team) wanted to get feedback on what folks would want to see or not see in the requesting process. There are plans to get rid of the old codebase and archive it and with it the ability to open namespace requests will be gone.

To set expectations for a few things, we do not want folks to request a namespace via email (kinda gives a feeling of things going into the abyss), we do not want folks opening a JIRA ticket manually (though some service/form could be used to open that ticket on the galaxy JIRA, which is public).

With expectations set on what we don’t want, lets bring up some potential ideas that the teams have brought forward.

1). Forum Post
This one is pretty straight forward and similar to the existing process. A template post would be added and or a tag added would be selected to identify a namespace request. A user would enter the desired name and admins to be added to the namespace.

2). Request Form
Somewhere (we can determine the best place for it) a form would live that again would have all the required info and most likely open a ticket on the galaxy team’s JIRA board (their board is public) and then assign the relevant folks to it for completion.

3). Github Issue
This is the current process and would most likely have to move locations given that the old code base will be archived in the future. That location would be up for debate if this option is preferred.

4). Other Ideas
We are open to other ideas on how to solve this problem and welcome them, please add them in your comments below.

Future Ideas and Self Service
So I want to separate these two things heavily. The above is for immediate namespace requests going forward. I don’t have a timeline but lets just say for the next year.

Would folks be open to the idea of a self service kind of portal to request a namespace on galaxy? This obviously comes with a lot of overhead for the team and also introduces some issues around domain squatting among other things. We are happy to discuss/develop ways to help mitigate that in the future when the feature is deployed but for now, I want to keep the discussion more around “Is this something we want?”.

Happy to read folks’ thoughts on this and what they might want to see. Again, I want to reiterate that nothing has been decided nor are the ideas/solutions limited to what is written above. Let us know your thoughts or what you want to see.

  • Forum Post
  • Form to open ticket
  • Github issue
  • None of these, left idea in comment
0 voters
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Setting aside the practical logistics, I think a perfect world scenario would be something like a self-service portal once the namespace has been established. For example, if I am already an admin of the cloud namespace, I would like to be able to login to some portal and audit who has access to the namespace and add or remove people as needed (such as when new people join my team/project, or when folks leave). I suspect that’s a pretty significant ask, but it would be awfully nice.

On the surface I like the idea of a form that creates a Jira ticket. Would that require requestors to have a jira account though? That feels like a high barrier to entry, the alternative probably has spam management issues though.

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This is a great initiative! And I know it’s about the request process, but I wanted to chime in with a couple of related thoughts around the actual naming:

For some context on the current process and related “challenges”, we have the following “Naming” doc: Ansible community package collections requirements — Ansible Documentation

Which links to the form in the Github repo mentioned by @thedoubl3j for creating the requests right now.

That doc also links to a broken (I just noticed) galaxy link which now can be found in the old galaxy instance: Galaxy Namespaces — Ansible Documentation that lists the limitations of the namespaces.

Something I think is worth mentioning / adding to the request process is documentation or information (embedded or linked) around the following issues:

  1. What are the reserved namespaces that can’t be used or requested (ansible, community, others?). What’s the use of those namespaces.
  2. Maybe mention “inclusion requirements” for the community namespace as an alternative to creating a whole namespace?
  3. Community guidelines around naming suggest to avoid using the same name for both, namespace and collections. Clarify what the namespace is supposed to be in regards to the collection name. The namespace is not the collection name.

The details/answers from the points above could be included in the mentioned doc and that doc linked in the “request form” to as a “read me first”.

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Setting aside the practical logistics, I think a perfect world scenario would be something like a self-service portal once the namespace has been established. For example, if I am already an admin of the cloud namespace, I would like to be able to login to some portal and audit who has access to the namespace and add or remove people as needed (such as when new people join my team/project, or when folks leave). I suspect that’s a pretty significant ask, but it would be awfully nice.

Just to clarify, this feature does exist in the UI right now. For any namespace that you own, an “access” tab exists on the namespace detail page where users can be added or removed.

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You could provide a self service system, which for now will create a ticket to whatever backend you prefer to use, and the namespace will be indicated as “pending” in the self service page.

This way you would not have to change the process again, and the documentation could be updated faster.

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Just for the record, Discourse has very recently added experimental support for forms (in a similar way to GitHub, I guess) - you can see it in action here. So, possibly, we could combine 1 and 2, and I’m sure CDCK would appreciate some help testing the feature :slight_smile:

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Clearly I visit the web UI often :sweat_smile: TIL, thanks!

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I just created a namespace for my github organization, but now I can’t login into ansible galaxy, I receive Server Error 500. Has anyone encountered this before and knows how I can solve it? I need to post a role for my organization.

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what did you create exactly @CatalinaSindrilaru because currently, namespace creation (for galaxy) cannot be done by users (if you are attempting to do it for anything other than your own namespace. in this case, it looks like your personal namespace is here.

What user are you attempting to login as? jmy guess might be that the user you are attempting to login with didn’t grant access for galaxy (we require read if I recall so you have to approve the app).

also, can you describe the error a little more in detail? is just a flat 500? a 503?

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also just for sake of not bloating this thread, can you create a new one and a tag galaxy-ng under optional tags?

you should be able to create a new post by navigating to topics and hitting the plus in bottom right right corner of your browser.

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Hi! This is my current topic

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Coming back to this topic - I’d like to see us use the forum for namespace requests. We can experiment with either a forum with topic template (#1 above) or what @gwmngilfen mentioned using discourse forms.

aka it’s about time we let the galaxy repo retire… it deserves to be out sipping :wine_glass: on the :beach_umbrella: vs staying open for the sake of namespace requests :slight_smile:

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